where the rehearsing backfires a little bit? >> had john mccain on our show on "morning joe" and he talked about that. he said you sit there for weeks on end, rehash and remembering your lines. a point where you have to walk away and be yourself. you had david axelrod say to you the other day that the romney campaign has had more preparation for this than it took to invade normandy so, you know, everybody is setting this funny bar of the other guy's so great. he's unbeatable. >> trying to set expectations low so it will be easy to see them. has this reached the point of absurdity. >> we in the media, what's going to happen in this first debate? what do people think is actually going to happen that -- we've seen thousands of hours, and we haven't seen them together, but other than one of them saying the most horrific thing, what do we think is going to happen that we haven't seen before with these guys? what are we waiting for? >> there's some hope that we will not be aiming towards immedia mediocrity and these two guys are the smartest guys we have available to fix the problems, yet